How the managing partner of a multi-billion-dollar private equity firm became a college basketball coach in Virginia

Courtesy of Longwood University

Longwood University coach Griff Aldrich coaches in a game earlier this season.

Longwood University coach Griff Aldrich coaches in a game earlier this season. (Courtesy of Longwood University)

Ed MillerStaff writer

Griff Aldrich has closed another deal. The Longwood University basketball coach hands a contract to guard Isaiah Walton that outlines his academic obligations and has the player sign it.

He tells Walton to put it on his mirror so he can see it every morning, and be reminded of him.

“If you’re not thinking of me already,” Aldrich says.

It is a January afternoon at Longwood, the day after a game and a day off from practice. Aldrich, 44, sits at a conference table in an office that doesn’t quite look like home yet, with pictures still to be hung and just a handful of trinkets and books on a shelf near the door.

In middle age, Aldrich is a rookie head coach, on the job about 10 months. That’s not unusual in a profession in which dues must be paid. But Aldrich, who grew up in Virginia Beach and starred in basketball at Norfolk Academy in the early 1990s, is no ordinary rookie. He was out of the college game nearly 20 years, charging hard in law, oil and gas and private equity, while living a life of unlikely juxtapositions.

He was a partner at the biggest law firm in Houston who married into one of the city’s most prominent old oil-money families, yet lived in the inner city.

He founded an oil and gas company, and later sought out and structured deals as managing partner of a multi-billion-dollar private equity firm, and yet outcoached AAU impresarios while wearing polo shirts and flip-flops.

He moved in elite circles in boardrooms while scratching a basketball itch that would not go away, spending off days watching college practices, and vacations visiting friends who ran their own programs.

As a younger man, his God was achievement, he said, his success measured by job and title. So he walked away from a small-college coaching job because of the low pay, yes, but also because he couldn’t bear the thought of waking up one day as a middle-aged coach who hadn’t advanced out of the small-time.

“I was so driven to do something with my life,” he said. “I think I had a lot of fear.”

He was a climber, coaching for the wrong reasons. He left the profession and began an ascent through corporate law in Houston and London, through oil and gas and private equity.

He gave back more than most, through his faith-based AAU program that a friend says “saved lives” of kids in tough circumstances, through his church and in the community. Faith was always a guide, and he always tried to do things the right way.

Yet there came a day when he asked himself if he was really as serious about his faith as he thought he was.

“For the first time for me in my Christian faith I realized, ‘Well, if this thing is really true and I’m really just going to heaven and I’m really just here for a short period of time, then it really doesn’t matter that I climb the ladder, that I amass more money.’ ”

“Do what you feel called to do and what you want to do.”

It took time, but Aldrich wound up in this small office in sleepy Farmville, quite possibly the least-likely coach in the country.

How did he get from there to here?

For once in his flawlessly mapped-out professional life, it wasn’t part of a plan.

“It was weird,” he said. “Because for the first time in my life I wasn’t trying to, you know, climb a ladder.”

Ever the achiever

Halfway into an hour-long interview, Aldrich, a 6-foot-2 former small-college guard, explains for a reporter what he did in private equity.

Friendly and expansive about a variety of topics — his faith, his family, his high-flying career before basketball — Aldrich demonstrates by re-imagining his conference table as an oil field, full of prospects.

“We’ve got a well here, a well here and a well here,” he says, pointing to several spots around the table. “We’ve got all these results, but this may be 15,000 acres.

“Now we can drill wells throughout, but we can’t afford to pay 100 percent of all that, so why don’t you come in? You have to buy into the project and you get to pay 50 percent of the costs.”

That’s where Aldrich’s firm, backed by Korean capital, would come in, buying stakes as “non-operators” and letting the companies do the drilling.

“Korea has no oil and gas,” Aldrich explains. “They were actually thinking if energy prices continue to skyrocket, if we have a bunch of money in energy, as costs go up, we’re not going to be hurt, we’re going to be making money on it.

“It was kind of a natural hedge is how they were looking at it.”

Now, there’s a play Krzyzewski, Boeheim or Calipari couldn’t draw up.

From way back, Aldrich was something of a natural hedger himself, with a wide range of talents giving him no shortage of potential career paths.

As a senior at Hampden-Sydney, where he played four years as a reserve, Aldrich had a job lined up as special assistant to Wake Forest coach Dave Odom, the father of his teammate and friend, Ryan Odom.

Ever the achiever, Aldrich also applied to law school. When he visited Dave Odom at the Final Four, word had gotten out that he’d been accepted at Virginia.

Odom pulled his offer.

“He called me into his hotel room and said, ‘You can’t come anymore. You’ve got to go to Virginia. You can always go back and coach, but you’ll never be able to do this again.’ ”

Aldrich went to law school. After graduation, he craved a second crack at joining Odom’s staff. Instead, a job came open at Hampden-Sydney. He became an assistant to his college coach, Tony Shaver.

The Tigers were a Division III power under Shaver, who took the job at William and Mary three years later and is still there. They finished 26-2 in Aldrich’s only season there.

Aldrich loved the job for the sheer fun of coaching and the opportunity to shape young lives. But he had a mountain of law-school debt and, on a salary of $24,000, was barely covering the interest on his loans.

Then there was the nagging fear: Was he climbing fast enough?

A friend from Texas asked Aldrich if he was still interested in law. He helped him land an interview with Vinson Elkins, an international firm based in Houston and renowned globally for its work in the energy industry.

Aldrich got the job, at a starting salary of $108,000, plus a signing bonus. He did fast-paced, high-stakes corporate work on tight deadlines.

Aldrich worked in Houston six years and might have never left. His wife, Julie, though, had always wanted to live overseas. To get a taste, Aldrich took a temporary job on a six-week deal in London. A week in, he was asked to stay.

He and Julie lived in London four years. She realized her dream of getting a theology degree from Oxford. As it happened, the day she arrived for a planned visit was the day prospective students could tour the school.

She wondered if she might get a waiver from Oxford’s residency requirement and be allowed to commute from London. She was told she could apply, but the school didn’t grant waivers.

She did, and it was granted.

Things felt destined like that. When the Aldriches returned to Houston, they felt changed, called in a different direction.

More impact

Aldrich had coached AAU basketball before he left, and wanted to resume, but in a way that had more impact. He found an outlet at The Forge For Families, a Christian ministry in Houston’s Third Ward, home to some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city.

Aldrich used the hook of basketball to lure in at-risk kids who might have the talent to play in college but not the grades or direction. They were required to come four days a week after school, and complete 30 minutes of reading comprehension and 30 minutes of math before practice. A local foodbank served dinner. Aldrich gave devotional talks.

On weekends, the team traveled regionally to play in tournaments. But Aldrich wasn’t necessarily looking to send kids on to major college ball or the NBA. If a player became good enough, as many did, he’d arrange for them to play for one of the higher-profile teams sponsored by a shoe company.

“I was trying to steer them in the right direction, trying to get them to start thinking about college,” Aldrich said. “The character issues were so apparent, the dysfunction that they lived in was so strong. It was more trying to provide them a productive environment.”

Among those given a helpful push was Shabooty Phillips, who was shooting at the gym at The Forge one day when Aldrich walked in.

Phillips was about 12 at the time. He didn’t know what to make of Aldrich, who looked like someone out of Forbes Magazine.

“He came in with a suit on and some church shoes,” Phillips said. “We started talking. He was like, ‘I bet I can beat you.’ ”

“We played. He beat me, in church shoes.”

Phillips joined the program. The sight of Aldrich showing up after work, tugging off his tie and suit jacket, became familiar at The Forge.

“He was 100 percent in,” said Ben Jones, who coached with Aldrich and now runs the program, called His Hoops. “When those kids came in, there was no doubt he was there for them.”

Aldrich was not as “in” as he wanted, though. He would coach the kids and drive back across town to a wealthy part of Houston. After a while, he decided he needed to do more.

“We would touch them, but with the chaos that they were living in, if you’re only touching them once a week, that’s better than no times a week, but it’s not enough,” he said.

The Aldriches moved into the Third Ward, within walking distance for many of their players. They rented a house between Yates High School, where most of the players attended, and The Forge, and moved in with their infant son Scott, the first of three children they would adopt. It became an after-school stopping point, with players coming over for dinner or just to hang out. One player with nowhere else to go lived with them for two years.

“Coming back from London, we had a lot of time to reflect on: Who do we want to be when we return to Houston?” Julie Aldrich said. “We had some friends who had lived overseas, and said it was easy to slide back into your old life.

“They challenged us and said: If you have been changed personally, spiritually, steward this experience well, and choose your life.”

Initially, not everyone was on board.

“A lot of our friends and family thought we were insane,” she said.

In time, however, they blended their old life and their new, and found it was OK to move in both spheres.

“It was an odd juxtaposition,” Griff said. “But it was one that we loved, because it allowed us to not be different, but we were really pursuing our passion and our calling.”

How to do it?

It called more and more. Even after he left the law firm to found the oil and gas company, and after he left that to go into private equity, Aldrich woke up each day thinking about coaching and working with the kids at His Hoops.

He began thinking of getting out of the business world and devoting more time to the AAU program. Or possibly getting into coaching.

Julie Aldrich watched him wrestle with the decision. She described her husband as a “verbal processor” who belies the male stereotype of not sharing his feelings. She said with a laugh that she “always knows what’s on his mind.”

“You reflect more on how you want to spend your time,” Julie said. “I wouldn’t say ambition was his God, but definitely achieving and driving and being excellent was always his mantra.

“He was operating out of a lot of 'shoulds': What I should do to get to the next level instead of what I want to do. I think he sort of experienced a little bit of a freedom, realizing he could pursue what he wanted to do and not just what he should do.”

The question was: How to do it? He began calling friends in the business. Among them were Ryan Odom, who was coaching at Lenior-Rhyne, and Seth Eliberg, a former teammate at Norfolk Academy who coached at the Hill School, a boarding school in Pennsylvania.

Eilberg was not surprised to hear from his friend, who had visited several times over the years to watch practices and be around the Hill School team.

“Griff has lived his life trying to figure out how to use his different talents to serve the community he’s in,” Eilberg said. “It just became increasingly clear to me every time we talked that he was missing the game and needed to find an even bigger outlet in which to coach and serve kids that way.”

Ryan Odom told Aldrich it wasn’t too late to get back in.

Aldrich appreciated the advice but wanted a different perspective. He made one more call, to Chad Warner, a friend who had recently left coaching to work in business development.

Warner, he thought, would surely tell him to stay put, and that the grass wasn’t greener in coaching.

Quite the opposite.

“I asked him if he was happy he left,” Aldrich said. “He said, ‘No, I’ve been trying to get back in since a week after I left.’ ”

A start at UMBC

Not long after, Odom called back and said he might have something in the works. He was hired as coach at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in March 2016 and asked Aldrich to come along.

Aldrich signed on as director of basketball operations, which can often be an entry-level position. Odom referred to him as his chief of staff.

“He had run big companies and been very successful,” Odom said. “I felt like he could help organize our program, and he certainly did.”

In his second year at UMBC, he took over recruiting and “program-building”, trying to establish a culture and way of doing things. While he developed metrics for recruiting and other areas, his biggest impact was personal, Odom said.

“Griff has a way of making his presence felt, in a very positive way,” he said. “He was really good at developing bonds with our players.”

Aldrich enjoyed it, and for the first time in his career, was not thinking of his next move. Before No. 16 seed UMBC shocked the world with an upset of No. 1 Virginia in the NCAA tournament, however, he popped on the radar of then-Longwood athletic director Troy Austin, who was looking for a coach.

Austin was intrigued but cautious. As impressed as he was with Aldrich’s business career and passion for developing young people, he wondered if he had the coaching chops needed in Division I. And wouldn’t a job like Longwood’s be a pay cut from what Aldrich was accustomed to making in the private sector?

Was he serious? Or just dabbling?

Austin did his own due diligence. Among the calls he made was to UMBC athletic director Tim Hall, who called Alrdrich a “hidden gem” and advised him to grab him before someone else did.

“He said not to be fearful because he was an unusual candidate,” Austin said. “Unconventional is not a bad thing sometimes, if someone has great leadership qualities."

It’s been a good thing so far for Longwood. It’s a Wednesday night, and the Lancers are hosting Hampton. With 13 wins heading into the game, Longwood’s six-game improvement is the best in the nation by a first-year coach. The Lancers’ start is currently the second-best in the school’s Division I era.

That’s not a long time. Longwood has only been in Division I for 15 years, and since moving up has never won more than 17 games. With little tradition and a gym that seats just 1,800, the program is as about as grassroots as it gets.

Players credit Aldrich with creating family atmosphere and instilling an attention to detail on the court. Aldrich said his aim is to win, of course, but also to incorporate much of the approach he took with his AAU program in Houston.

“We want to develop a successful program that’s highly competitive and competing for championships, but never do we want to sacrifice trying to help shape men as our primary focus,” Aldrich says.

To that end, it’s announced before the game that Walton, who signed the contract in Aldrich’s office the week before, has been suspended indefinitely for “failure to meet team expectations.”

The 6-5 senior is Longwood’s leading scorer at 17.8 points per game.

Others pick up some of the slack, including Phillips. The former kid Aldrich beat one-on-one years ago at The Forge came to Longwood from a junior college this season and scores a team-high 18 points.

Still, Longwood falls to Hampton 96-83.

The next day, Aldrich announces Walton has been dismissed from the team. He will remain in school.

It’s a reality of business: Not all deals work out. Some take a little longer to bear fruit. Sometimes you’ve got to ride out a downturn.

For Aldrich, the stakes are more profound than in his previous career, he believes. In a couple years, he won’t remember the Hampton game, he says. But holding a player accountable now could pay off much further down the road in his life.

He’s had big jobs and enviable titles. This is a different realm and offers a different platform.

Aldrich doesn’t take it for granted. Not after the unlikely road that brought him where he feels he’s meant to be.

"By anyone's measure in the basketball world, I shouldn't be here," he said. "I do feel a heavy sense of responsibility to invest where I am.”